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    Texasville: A Novel
    Texasville: A Novel
    Texasville: A Novel
    Ebook652 pages11 hours

    Texasville: A Novel

    By Larry McMurtry

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    With Texasville, Larry McMurtry returns to the unforgettable Texas town and entertaining characters from one of his best-loved books, The Last Picture Show.

    This is a Texas-sized story brimming with home truths of the heart, and men and women we recognize, believe in, and care about deeply. Set in the post-oil-boom 1980s, Texasville brings us up to date with Duane, who's got an adoring dog, a sassy wife, a twelve-million-dollar debt, and a hot tub by the pool; Jacy, who's finished playing "Jungla" in Italian movies and who's returned to Thalia; and Sonny—Duane's teenage rival for Jacy's affections—who owns the car wash, the Kwik-Sackstore, and the video arcade.

    With his talent for writing lovable, eccentric characters, Texasville is one of Larry McMurtry's funniest and most touching contemporary novels.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJun 1, 2010
    ISBN9781451607680
    Texasville: A Novel
    Author

    Larry McMurtry

    Larry McMurtry is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. He has also written memoirs and essays, and received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Brokeback Mountain.

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    Reviews for Texasville

    3.5/5

    174 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Another great family story by one of my favorite authors.
    • 3/5
      I really like Larry McMurtry's output, but this one only gets three stars because, although it is funny, at 500 pages we hear far too much about middle-aged Duane Moore.
    • 5/5
      (09 April 2000, America)A re-read of this second book in the Last Picture Show series, as I build up to reading the newly acquired fourth and fifth volumes. It’s thirty years since the events of “The Last Picture Show”. Duane and Sonny are still in Thalia; Duane’s married to the terrifying but wonderful Karla, and Jacy’s rumoured to be back in town. Depression and boredom are rife as the oil recession hits,and everyone in town seems to be sleeping with the wrong person. It’s a depressing but moving slice of small town life, pinned loosely around preparations for the town’s centennial celebrations, even though the original county town, the Texasville of the title, has disappeared into the dust. The book has an open, fluid structure that mirrors that of many of the marriages portrayed, and there are some great wild kids and set pieces – who could forget the tumbleweed stampede? (well, I had, in the 12 years since I last read this). The side characters such as the magnificent Ruth Popper, with her marathon running, make this a full and rich read. Amusingly, Danny Deck has a cameo, or his house did. Danny is the hero of “All My Friends are Going to be Strangers” and later on, “Some Can Whistle” – McMurtry pops characters from one book into another a lot; Cadillac Jack has his own book and appears in another one.My review from April 2000: Another of his wonderful books – this one comes between “The Last Picture Show” and “Duane’s Depressed” and we see the tragi-comic life of Thalia (the tumbleweed stampede being a comedy high point). Characters are so, so believable, as are the sprawling events.
    • 3/5
      "Texasville" is the sequel to "The Last Picture Show" and the book Larry McMurtry wrote following "Lonesome Dove."This story picks up 30 years after the events in "'The Last Picture Show" the wild high school students are now middle aged people trying to re-capture their youth.Duane Moore is an oil man with huge debts. Like many, he became rich during the oil boom but now that OPEC has cut prices, like many of his friends, Duane is going broke.The town is about to celebrate it's centennial and a number of old friends talk to Duane but they can't think of anyone worthy of honoring for their success after high school.While this is happening, Duane spends much of his time reminiscing about his high school days and the glory of the football team. Then his high school girl friend returns to town and things get complicated.The characters are well described and interesting to see compared to where they were thirty years ago. I enjoyed the story but didn't think it measured up to "The Last Picture Show."
    • 4/5
      The sequel to "The Last Picture Show", which introduced Duane Moore and the various denizens of the small Texas town of Thalia. It is some 30 years later, and Duane is now an oilman who achieved riches during the oil boom, and is now deep in debt along with everybody else in town because of the worldwide oil glut. He and his wife Karla somehow have forged a lasting marriage, but it's not immediately clear what it's based on, what with various affairs, misunderstandings and arguments twixt the two of them. Thalia becomes an immeasurably more complicated place for Duane when his high school girlfriend Jacy returns from Europe after the death of her child, and somehow strikes up a strong bond with Karla and the rest of Duane's family, even his dog Shorty. All this takes place during the town's centennial celebration, which evolves into a manic affair wilder and more surreal than anything Garisson Keillor imagined in his books. I seem to have somehow wandered into these books near the end of the story, and have been working my way backwards. All that remains is the one that started it, "The Last Picture Show", to which I look forward with a finely-honed antictipation.
    • 4/5
      It is the 1980s, and the small Texas oil town, Thalia, which we first visited in Larry McMurtry's [The Last Picture Show], is reeling from the OPEC-driven crash in oil prices. We see the town through the eyes of Duane Moore, also the protagonist of Picture Show. Moore owns the small, local oil company that until recently has employed a good many of the town's citizens and kept the Thalia economy humming. Now, as oil prices keep falling and the bottom falls out of the recent boom, he faces bankruptcy and the town faces economic disaster. Sounds pretty grim, but this book is in fact a dark comedy, as the town, unhinged by these developments, becomes whackier and whackier. Duane's family is nuts, his friends are going nuts, and the preparations for the town's Centennial Celebration, of which Duane is chairman, grow more contentious and ever more absurd. McMurtry puts it this way:"{Duane} had never supposed that people really lived as they ought to live, but he had gone through much of his life at least believing there was a way they ought to live. And Thalia of all places--a modest small town--ought to be a place where people lived as they ought to live, allowing for a normal margin of human error. Surely, in Thalia, far removed from big-city temptations, people ought to be living on the old model--putting their families and neighbors first, leading more or less orderly, more or less responsible lives.But he knew almost everyone in Thalia--indeed, knew more than he wanted to know about most of them--and it was clear from what he knew that the old model had been shattered. The arrival of money cracked the model; it's departure shattered it. Irrationality now bloomed as prolifically as broom weeds in a wet year."Duane's confusion and despondency grow, as his wife seems disappointed in every word out of his mouth and his marriage seems to be slipping away.I found the first half of this book to be excellent indeed, with many spot-on, wry observations about small town life and human nature within that growing irrationality of the town's denizens. I frequently laughed out loud while recognizing quite clearly the solid humanity of the characters. The second half, I think, loses steam, but not nearly to the extent that it robs the book of its enjoyability or value. And, happily, the last 40 pages or so are excellent. I do recommend this book.

    Book preview

    Texasville - Larry McMurtry

    CHAPTER 1

    DUANE WAS IN THE HOT TUB, SHOOTING AT HIS NEW doghouse with a .44 Magnum. The two-story log doghouse was supposedly a replica of a frontier fort. He and Karla had bought it at a home show in Fort Worth on a day when they were bored. It would have housed several Great Danes comfortably, but so far had housed nothing. Shorty, the only dog Duane could put up with, never went near it.

    Every time a slug hit the doghouse, slivers of white wood flew. The yard of the Moores’ new mansion had just been seeded, at enormous expense, but the grass had a tentative look. The house stood on a long, narrow, rocky bluff, overlooking a valley pockmarked with well sites, saltwater pits and oily little roads leading from one oil pump to the next. The bluff was not a very likely place to grow Bermuda grass, but six acres of it had been planted anyway. Karla took the view that you could make anything happen if you spent enough money.

    Duane had even less confidence in the Bermuda grass than the grass had in itself, but he signed the check, just as he had signed the check for the doghouse he was slowly reducing to kindling. For a time, buying things he had no earthly use for had almost convinced him he was still rich, but that trick had finally stopped working.

    Shorty, a Queensland blue heeler, blinked every time the gun roared. Unlike Duane, he was not wearing shooter’s ear-muffs. Shorty loved Duane so much that he stuck by his side throughout the day, even at the risk of becoming hearing impaired.

    Shorty had the eyes of a drunkard—red-streaked and vacant. Julie and Jack, the eleven-year-old twins, threw rocks at him when their father wasn’t around. They were both good athletes and hit Shorty frequently with the rocks, but Shorty didn’t mind. He thought it meant they loved him.

    Karla, Duane’s beautiful, long-legged wife, came out of the house, a mug of coffee in her hand, and started walking across the long yard to the deck. It was a clear spring morning; she had already put in an hour in the garden. Her tomatoes were under threat from the blister bugs.

    When he saw Karla coming, Duane took off the earmuffs. It annoyed her severely if he kept them on while she was complaining.

    Now you’re ruining that brand-new doghouse, Duane, she said, sitting down on the deck. I guess I’m trapped out here in the country with a man that’s going crazy. I’m glad we sent the twins off to camp.

    They’ll probably get kicked out in a day or two, Duane said. They’ll commit incest or something.

    No, it’s a church camp, Karla said. They’ll just pray for their horrible little souls.

    They were quiet for a minute. Though it was only seven in the morning, the temperature was close to ninety.

    You can die if you stay in a hot tub too long, Karla remarked. "I read it in USA Today."

    They heard screams from the distant house. They came from Little Mike, Nellie’s terrible two. In a moment the baby joined in.

    Nellie may not even hear them, Karla said. She’s probably got her Walkman on.

    Nellie, nineteen, had just moved out on her third husband. She liked getting married, but regarded the arrangement as little more binding than a handshake.

    Karla wore a T-shirt with a motto stenciled on the front. The motto said, YOU’RE THE REASON OUR CHILDREN ARE UGLY, which was the title of a song sung by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty. Karla laughed every time she heard the song.

    She had thirty or forty T-shirts with lines from hillbilly songs printed on them. Every time she heard a lyric which seemed to her to express an important truth, she had a T-shirt printed. Occasionally she took the liberty of altering a line in some clever way, though no one around Thalia seemed to notice.

    Duane had once pointed out to her that their children weren’t ugly.

    They got personalities like wild dogs, but at least they’re good-looking, he said.

    That’s true, they take after me, Karla said. Her complexion was the envy of every woman she knew. Karla’s skin was like cream with a bit of cinnamon sprinkled on it.

    Dickie, their twenty-one-year-old son, had been voted Most Handsome Boy in Thalia High School, both his junior and senior years. Nellie had been Most Beautiful Girl her sophomore year, but had lost out the next two years thanks to widespread envy among the voters. Jack and Julie were the best-looking twins in Texas, so far as anyone knew. Dickie made most of his living peddling marijuana, and Nellie—with three marriages in a year and a half—would probably pass Elizabeth Taylor on the marriage charts before she was twenty-one, but no one could deny that they were good-looking kids.

    Karla, at forty-six, remained optimistic enough to believe almost everything she saw printed on a T-shirt. Duane was more skeptical. He had started poor, become rich, and now was losing money so rapidly that he had come to doubt that much of anything was true, in any sense. He had eight hundred and fifty dollars in the bank and debts of roughly twelve million, a situation that was becoming increasingly untenable.

    Duane twirled the chamber of the .44. His hand ached a little. The big gun had a kick.

    You know what I hate worse than anything in the world? Karla asked.

    No, and I’m not going to guess, Duane said.

    Karla laughed. It’s not you, Duane, she said.

    She had another T-shirt which read, I’VE GOT THE SADDLE, WHERE’S THE HORSE? It was, it seemed to her, a painfully clear reference to Mel Tillis’s sexiest song, I’ve Got the Horse if You’ve Got the Saddle. But of course no one in Thalia caught the allusion. When she wore it, all that happened was that men tried to sell her overpriced quarter horses.

    The thing I hate most in the world is blister bugs, Karla said. I wanta hire a wetback to help me with this garden.

    I don’t know why you plant such a big garden, Duane said. We couldn’t eat that many tomatoes if we ate twenty-four hours a day.

    I was raised to be thrifty, Karla said.

    Why’d you buy that BMW then? Duane asked. You could have bought a pickup if you wanted to be thrifty. A BMW won’t last a week on these roads.

    Their new house was five miles from town, dirt roads all the way. When they started building the house they intended to pave the road themselves, but the boom ended before they even got the house built, and it was clear that dirt roads would be their destiny for some time to come.

    Duane had started hating the new house before the foundation was laid. He would have moved tomorrow, but he was surrounded by a wall of debtors, and anyway Karla loved the house and would have resisted any suggestion that they face up to straitened circumstances and try to sell it as soon as the paint dried.

    He poked the barrel of the .44 into the water. Refraction made the barrel seem to grow. Shorty moved closer to the edge of the hot tub and peered in at it. Everything Duane did seemed interesting to Shorty. Many human actions were incomprehensible to him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t watch.

    Duane, why are you poking that gun in the water? Karla asked.

    I was thinking of shooting my dick off, he said. It’s caused me nothing but trouble my whole life.

    Karla took that news with equanimity. She scratched her shapely calf. Karla believed that the way not to have your figure ruined by childbearing was to have your kids young and then get tied off. Shortly after producing Nellie she got tied off, but ten years later something came untied. Intermittently religious, she decided it must be God’s will that they have twins. It should have been medically impossible—and besides that, she and Duane only rarely made love.

    But one afternoon, after ten days of rain, with the rigs all shut down, they did make love and the twins resulted. During the pregnancy Karla tried to cheer herself up by imagining that she was about to produce little human angels, perfect in every way. Why else would God give her twins when her husband wasn’t even giving her a sex life?

    The twins were born, and as soon as Jack grew four teeth he bit completely through his sister’s ear. The angel theory was discarded—indeed, while sitting in the emergency room getting Julie’s ear fixed Karla stopped being religious for good.

    Jack and Julie were terrible babies. They bit and clawed one another like little beasts. They shouldered one another out of their baby bed, and stuffed toys in one another’s mouths. As soon as they could lift things they hit each other with whatever they could lift. It seemed to Karla that she spent more and more of her life in emergency rooms—indeed, the twins were not safe from themselves even there. Once Julie grabbed some surgical scissors off a tray and jabbed her brother in the ear with them.

    My kids believe in an ear for an ear, Karla told her friends, who enjoyed gallows humor.

    She learned never to take the twins to the hospital at the same time: there were too many weapons in hospitals.

    In time Karla concluded that the twins’ conception had nothing to do with Divine Will, and everything to do with medical incompetence. She wanted to bring a malpractice suit against Doctor Deckert, the young general practitioner who tied her off.

    No, you can’t sue him, Duane said. You might run him off, and if you do half the people in town will die of minor ailments.

    Shit, what about us? Karla said. We got a life sentence because of him.

    Shortly after that Karla had a T-shirt printed which read, INSANITY IS THE BEST REVENGE. The line wasn’t original with her, nor was it from a hillbilly song. She had seen it on a bumper sticker and liked it.

    In fact, Karla found almost as many important truths on bumper stickers as she found in songs. One which hewed very closely to her own philosophy of life said, IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING SET IT FREE. IF IT DOESN’T RETURN IN A MONTH OR TWO HUNT IT DOWN AND KILL IT.

    With more amusement than alarm, she watched Duane point the pistol into the water.

    Duane, I don’t think you ought to try and shoot your dick off, she said.

    Why not? he asked. It don’t work half the time anyway.

    Well, I wouldn’t be the one to know about that, Karla said. But it’s a small target and if you miss you’ll just ruin our new hot tub.

    She laughed loudly at her own wit. Shorty, excited by the laughter, began to roll around on the redwood deck. He attempted to bite his own tail and came close to nipping it a time or two.

    Don’t sulk, Duane, Karla said. You left yourself wide open for that one.

    She stood up and kicked Shorty lightly in the ribs. Shorty was too excited by the pursuit of his own tail to take any notice.

    I guess I’ll go in and see if I can talk Nellie into acting like a parent for a few minutes, Karla said.

    Duane took the gun out of the water. In the far corner of the vast yard the new white satellite dish was tilted skyward, its antenna pointed toward a spot somewhere over the equator. The dish was the most expensive one available in Dallas. Before they had even got it aligned properly Karla had gone to Dallas and returned with a Betamax, a VHS and four thousand dollars’ worth of movies she had purchased from a video store. So far they had only watched two of them: Coal Miner’s Daughter, which Karla and Nellie watched once or twice a week, and a sex movie called Hot Channels.

    Duane pointed out to her that it was possible to rent movies. They could even be rented from Sonny Crawford’s small convenience store, in Thalia.

    I know that, Duane, Karla said. Just because I’m horny don’t mean I’m dumb. The ones I want to see are always checked out, though.

    However, on her next visit to Dallas she considerately bought only eight hundred dollars’ worth of movies.

    Duane had been in the hot tub nearly half an hour and was beginning to feel a little bleached. He climbed out and dried himself and his pistol. He felt weary—very weary. Sometimes he would wake up in the night needing to relieve himself and would feel so tired by the time he stumbled into the bathroom that he would have to sit on the pot and nap for a few minutes before going back to bed. Getting rich had been tiring, but nothing like as tiring as going broke.

    The minute Duane climbed out, Shorty stopped rolling around on the deck and raced across the yard to park himself expectantly beside Duane’s pickup. He knew it was almost time for Duane to go to town, and he was ready to roll.

    CHAPTER 2

    ON THE WAY TO TOWN DUANE GOT ON THE CB AND tried to check in with Ruth Popper, his outspoken secretary, who was actually no more outspoken than Karla, his wife, or Janine Wells, his girlfriend, or Minerva, his maid.

    While he was becoming rich, the women in his life had become outspoken. He had stopped being rich, but they had not stopped being outspoken. Any one of them would argue with a skillet, or with whatever was being cooked in the skillet, or with whoever came by—Duane himself, usually—to eat what was being cooked.

    He didn’t really want to talk to Ruth, but there was always the faint chance that oil prices had risen during the night, in which case somebody with a little credit left might want an oil well drilled.

    The CB crackled, but Ruth didn’t answer. Shorty watched the CB alertly. At first he had barked his characteristic piercing bark every time it crackled, but after Duane had whacked him with his work gloves several hundred times Shorty got the message and stopped barking at it, though he continued to watch it alertly in case whatever was in it popped out and attacked Duane.

    Just as the pickup swung onto the highway leading into Thalia, Ruth Popper jogged off the pavement and began to run up the dirt road. Ruth was a passionate jogger. She passed so close to the pickup that Duane could have leaned out and hit her in the head with a hammer—though only if he’d been quick. Despite her age, Ruth was speedy. She wore earphones and had a Walkman, a speedometer, and various other gadgets attached to her belt as she ran. She also carried an orange weight in each hand.

    She showed no sign of being aware that she had just passed within a yard of her boss and his dog. Feeling slightly foolish, Duane hung up the CB and watched her recede in the rearview mirror, her feet throwing up neat identical puffs of dust from the powdery road.

    Ruth Popper was the only person left in Thalia who had preserved a belief in exercise, now that the oil boom was over. It had taken the greatest bonanza in local memory to popularize exercise among people who had worked too hard all their lives to give it the least thought, but once it caught on it caught on big.

    Duane himself started jogging four miles a day, and devoted an evening or two a week to racquetball at the Wichita Falls country club. Roughnecks and farmers, finding themselves suddenly rich, floundered painfully over the county’s gravelly roads in their expensive running shoes.

    In the case of Jimbo Jackson, briefly the richest person in the county, a devotion to exercise had tragic results: a truckful of his own roughnecks, on their way to set pipe on one of his own wells, ran over him. Two or three trucks were ahead of them, carrying pipe to other wells, and Jimbo, flopping along patiently in the choking dust, not far from his newly completed mansion, accidentally veered into the middle of the road. The roughnecks thought they had hit a yearling—Jimbo was not small—but when they got out to look, discovered they had killed their boss.

    The local paper, in a mournful editorial, advised joggers to keep to the bar ditches—a stance that infuriated Karla.

    The bar ditches are full of chiggers and rattlesnakes, she said. What does he think this is, the Cotswolds?

    Duane wondered if it could be Cotswold, Kansas, she was referring to. During the virtually sleepless year when he had driven a cattle truck, Karla had sometimes come with him on his runs. He was just back from Korea; they were just married. It seemed to him he had passed through a town called Cotswold, though it might have been in Nebraska or even Iowa. But it didn’t seem to him that the bar ditches in Kansas could be that much better to jog in than the bar ditches in Texas.

    Duane, it’s in England, Karla said. Don’t you remember? We read about it in that airlines magazine the time we took the kids to Disneyland.

    Duane didn’t enjoy being reminded of the time they took the kids to Disneyland. Jack had almost succeeded in drowning Julie on the log ride. Dickie, who hated to spend money on anything except drugs, got caught shoplifting. He tried to steal his girlfriend a stuffed gorilla from one of the gift shops. Nellie disappeared completely, having decided to run off to Guaymas with a young Mexican she met on one of the rides. They stopped in Indio so Nellie could call her boyfriend in Thalia and tell him she was breaking off their engagement. The boyfriend managed to reach Karla and Duane, and the runaways were stopped at the Arizona line.

    Nine months later, having married and divorced the boy she had meant to break up with, Nellie had Little Mike, their first grandchild. He did not look Hispanic, or bear any resemblance to the husband she had had so briefly.

    They say travel’s broadening, Karla remarked, on the flight home from Disneyland.

    Duane looked up just in time to see Jack slip two ice cubes from his Coke down the neck of a little old woman who had been brought on board in a wheelchair and dumped in the seat in front of him.

    Whoever said that never traveled with our kids, Duane said as the old lady began to writhe in her seat. I’m telling you right now I’ll commit suicide before I’ll go anywhere with them again.

    He glanced at Julie to see what evil she might be contemplating. Julie wore dark glasses with huge purple frames. She had a teen magazine spread over her lap and her hand under the magazine. Duane decided to his horror that she was playing with her crotch.

    What did you say, Duane? Karla asked. I was reading and didn’t hear.

    I said I’d commit suicide before I’d go anywhere else with these kids, he said.

    Duane, don’t brag, Karla said. You know you’re too big a sissy even to go to the hospital and get a shot.

    She noticed the little old lady, who was writhing more desperately as the ice cubes worked their way down her back.

    I hope that old lady isn’t going into convulsions, she said.

    Duane had been trying to decide where his duty lay. Should he try to help the old lady get the ice cubes out, which would practically mean undressing her? Should he grab Jack and break his neck? Should he demand that his son apologize? Jack was an ingenious liar and accepted no punishment meekly. The more blatant his crimes, the more brilliant he became in his own defense. Duane began to get a headache. He felt like strangling his son. He wondered if the stewardesses realized that his beautiful little daughter was playing with her crotch. Dallas-Fort Worth seemed very far away.

    Duane, don’t sulk, it was a real nice trip in some ways, Karla said.

    CHAPTER 3

    DUANE WAS WELL AWARE THAT HIS IGNORANCE OF the world, and his unwillingness to go and see much of it, were shortcomings that particularly enraged Karla, though why they enraged her he had no idea, since she was every bit as ignorant of the world beyond Texas. He had been to California three times, and she had only been once. He had been to Las Vegas twice and had asked her to go both times. Both invitations had led to fits—the fit being one of Karla’s favorite forms of self-expression.

    "No, thanks, the only reason you’re going is to get laid, and I’m not giving you a chance to accuse me of standing in the way of that," she said.

    Duane knew perfectly well she wasn’t standing in the way of it. Karla was a firm believer in sexual freedom, especially for her.

    I just thought you might like to see one of those shows, he said.

    If I wanta see tits all I have to do is take my bra off, Karla said.

    She didn’t really even have to do that, since her daughter Nellie’s fine young bosom was frequently on view around the house. For almost a year dinner had been eaten to the sound of Little Mike slurping at his mother. Nellie was too lazy to wean him, despite repeated entreaties from Karla, who had not cared for breast-feeding and didn’t enjoy watching it take place.

    Bobby Lee, Duane’s number one tool pusher, was the only one who got much of a thrill out of watching Nellie nurse Little Mike or Barbette, the baby girl. With oil at twenty-one dollars a barrel and sinking, there wasn’t too much drilling to do. Bobby Lee had plenty of leisure to devote to watching Nellie nurse her kids. His desire was obvious, but so far Nellie had refused him—and being refused by Nellie was virtually a unique distinction.

    Bobby Lee had worked for Duane for over twenty years and made it plain that he hoped to marry into the family someday, although he was already married.

    I don’t know why you’d want to, except that you never have been in your right mind, Duane said.

    He had no serious objections, though. Bobby Lee would make at least as good a son-in-law as the first three Nellie had presented them with.

    Karla, however, had plenty of objections, which she aired whenever she could get Bobby Lee alone. Unbeknownst to Duane, she and Bobby Lee had had a messy one-night stand several years back. Duane had been off deer hunting. It left Karla unaffected but caused Bobby Lee to fall madly in love.

    The fact that she was completely uninterested in him as a boyfriend didn’t mean—as Karla repeatedly pointed out—that she wanted him sleeping with her daughter, or daughters. Bobby Lee was a small man with mournful brown eyes. If Nellie wasn’t around, the mournful eyes would frequently linger on Julie, who was just coming into bud.

    It does look like, with all the horny women there are in this country, you could find someone not related to me, if you’d just look, Karla told him.

    What horny women? Bobby Lee asked. He liked to project an image of asceticism, although he could be found every night at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge, and Aunt Jimmie’s was not exactly a monastery.

    When Barbette was born, two months previously, Karla decided she was going to have to take the weaning of Little Mike into her own hands. In his two years he had shown no interest in restraint, and if he felt his food source threatened there was no telling what he might do to his baby sister.

    Karla started kidnapping him every day. She drove him around in her new BMW, plugged in via Walkman to the loudest music she could find in the hope of drowning out his screams. Little Mike threw several bottles out the window, but he eventually broke.

    Duane had a deep fondness for the tiny, helpless Barbette. She fulfilled his old longing for a quiet, gentle child. He would sit with her for hours on the deck of the hot tub, shading her with a cowboy hat. Sometimes he dreamed that he and Barbette were living somewhere else—where was never quite clear, though it might have been San Marcos, where he and Karla had once contemplated moving.

    His urge to protect Barbette was very strong, and his biggest worry was the twins, who pitched her around like a ball. One day they left her on a kitchen cabinet and went outside to swim. By a miracle of timing Duane came in from work just in time to keep her from rolling off. The shock flooded him with so much adrenaline that he began to tremble; it produced a rage that frightened even the twins, who put on tennis shoes and immediately ran off. They planned to hitchhike to Disneyland and get jobs as concessionaires.

    Nellie and Karla, returning from a quick shopping trip to Wichita Falls, accidently intercepted the twins just before they reached the highway. They were in their bathing suits. Both claimed that Duane had threatened to kill them.

    Oh, I doubt he would have, Karla said, not absolutely convinced. Duane did love that baby girl.

    The twins were convinced, though. They didn’t want to go back home. Jack crawled through a barbed-wire fence and ran off into a pasture. Julie calmed herself by appropriating her big sister’s Walkman and listening to a little Barbara Mandrell. Little Mike, sensing an opportunity to regain a lost paradise, clawed his way under Nellie’s blouse and fastened himself blissfully to a nipple.

    Let’s go back to town and get the sheriff, Nellie said.

    Don’t let that child nurse, Karla said. What about his baby sister? She might want something to eat when we get home.

    I don’t want to go home, Nellie said. Little Mike was draining her so fast she felt dizzy.

    Nellie, we have to go home, Karla said. We live there.

    Meanwhile, Jack had disappeared into the pasture.

    I want to stay with Billie Anne, Nellie declared. Billie Anne was Dickie’s girlfriend. She worked in a savings-and-loan and had an apartment in the small community of Lakeside City.

    Little Mike, not wasting a second, switched to the other breast.

    Karla began to blow the horn, thinking it might make Jack come back. Instead, it caused Julie to open the door and slip out. Karla and Nellie were both too agitated to notice her departure. When they got home and discovered she wasn’t in the car, they were dumbfounded. She had been right in the car, listening to Barbara Mandrell, except now they were home and she wasn’t.

    Nellie refused to get out until Karla determined whether Duane was still planning to murder his family.

    Don’t kill the motor, she said. I might be leaving quick.

    Duane was out by the pool, giving Barbette a bottle. His rage has passed, leaving him only mildly irritated.

    I guess you’d all go off and leave this baby to starve, he said.

    Karla quickly regained the initiative.

    Duane, the twins have run completely off because of you, and Nellie won’t even come in the house, she said. You’ll have to go out to the car and promise not to murder her.

    Have I ever murdered anybody? he asked. Giving Barbette her bottle gave him a lot of satisfaction.

    No, but you’re not usually under this much stress, Karla said. You could try calling that stress hot line in Fort Worth when you feel sort of pent up.

    That stress hot line is for broke farmers, he said. It ain’t for destitute oil millionaires.

    It occurred to him, looking at the scrubby oil-stained acres below the bluff, that in a sense he did live on an oil farm, one that was about farmed out.

    Duane, it’s for anybody that’s feeling terrible, like people do when they go berserk, Karla said. They ain’t gonna ask if you’re a farmer—they’ll just give you helpful advice, like don’t murder your children or anything.

    That baby could have been brain-damaged for life falling off the cabinet, Duane pointed out. Where’s Minerva? I thought we were paying her to watch this baby.

    I have no idea where Minerva could have got to, Karla said. Minerva had worked for them for more than a decade without becoming any more predictable.

    If she comes back I’m going to offer to trade jobs with her, Duane said. She can run the oil company and I’ll watch the baby.

    Karla got a blue Magic Marker and wrote the number of the stress hot line on a piece of note paper. Then she stuck the paper onto the cabinet, right by the phone. Duane watched her with a disquieting look of amusement on his face. Karla remembered reading in Cosmo that people who were about to go berserk often seemed perfectly normal up until the moment when they started blasting away with a gun.

    That very morning she and Duane had seen a TV report about a Midland oilman who had carbon-monoxided himself in the garage of his new mansion. He had thoughtfully turned off his brand-new security system so that if one of his kids happened to glance at a TV monitor they wouldn’t see him turning black, or whatever you did if you monoxided yourself.

    Duane, Nellie’s just sitting out there wasting gas, Karla said. You’re going to have to do something about the twins, too.

    Duane walked Barbette until she went to sleep, and laid her gently in her baby bed. Then he went outside and whistled at Shorty, who was in the pickup in a flash, so excited at getting to take an unexpected trip that he barked his piercing bark a few times.

    On the way to town Duane called the Highway Patrol to see if the twins had been picked up. They hadn’t. He saw a dust cloud approaching and pulled well to the right. In a moment Minerva flashed by, the back seat of her ancient Buick piled high with groceries.

    Minerva had been their household help for the past ten years. Well into her eighties, she had been rich once herself. Her father made a fortune in the oil boom of the early twenties, and lost it a few years later. Minerva learned to drive in a muddy Pierce-Arrow and continued, from then on, to take her half of the road out of the middle.

    This habit had resulted in five head-on collisions, all of which Minerva had come through without a scratch. As a result of these infractions Minerva spent most of her evenings at Bad Driver’s School in Wichita Falls. She was indifferent to the traffic laws, but rather enjoyed Bad Driver’s School, acquiring several boyfriends there over the years.

    Most humans fantasized pleasures of one sort or another, but Minerva Hooks was different. She fantasized mortal illness. When Karla hired her she was fantasizing cancer in both lungs. Karla thought it would be nice to give the poor old soul a home during her last years. Now Minerva’s soul was ten years older and she was fantasizing a brain tumor, the lung cancer, as well as several other cancers, having miraculously gone away.

    It might have been cooking on the microwave that cured me, Minerva theorized. Or else it could have been watching TV. I’ve heard that TV gives off little rays that are good for curing up cancers.

    She had been the prime mover behind the purchase of the satellite dish, in fact. A poor sleeper, she often felt the need for a dose of the little rays during the night. Sometimes Duane would have to get up at three or four in the morning to go deal with a problem at one of the rigs, and would often find Minerva in the den, watching a sex show that had been relayed through the heavens from Copenhagen or somewhere.

    Minerva regarded sex shows with considerable skepticism.

    Now I’ve never seen one that big and I’ve lived eighty-three years, she said. It’s bigger than that girl’s whole head. You think that’s done with special effects, or what, Duane?

    I have no idea, Duane said.

    You ain’t really interested in it anymore, are you? Minerva asked, switching her attention to him.

    Oh, sure, he said. I’m interested in it.

    No, you ain’t, Minerva said. You ain’t, but I am. Not this here show, particularly—I think one that big has got to be special effects. I’d rather watch them Jap wrestlers than stuff like this anytime.

    Minerva was a passionate fan of sumo wrestling and would study the cable guide for hours in the hope of locating some.

    Driving through the dark toward the rig that had developed the problem, Duane felt a little aggrieved. It was getting so he couldn’t turn around without someone reminding him that he was off his feed, sexually. Karla reminded him, Janine reminded him, and now even Minerva was reminding him. His wife and his girlfriend might be expected to notice a lack of appetite, but why was it obvious to Minerva? Duane didn’t know.

    Next to watching sumo wrestling, the thing Minerva liked to do best was rip into town and charge a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of groceries to Karla’s account. That was what she had just done.

    Duane found both twins playing video games at Sonny Crawford’s small video arcade. It was in the rundown building that had once housed the town’s pool hall and domino parlor. Sonny had done well with the arcade for a few years, but video glut soon became as widespread as oil glut, and Sonny had been talking of closing it. He had already moved a few of the more popular games into the Kwik-Sack, his convenience store.

    Over the years, Sonny had acquired four or five of the buildings around the square, including the old hotel. He only operated the hotel a few nights a year, during the opening days of quail or dove season, when it would fill up with hunters. Otherwise it stood empty and dusty. Ruth Popper had lived on the top floor for a few years, after her husband had tried unsuccessfully to kill her, but then she bought a trailer house and moved out. For most of the year Sonny was the only person in the hotel.

    He had no children of his own, and doted on Duane’s. He had given each twin two dollars in quarters.

    Just because I threaten to kill you don’t mean I’m serious, Duane said, on the ride home. Running away from home in your bathing suits is not too smart.

    You can get arrested for child abuse, Jack reminded him.

    I wish Nellie would get married and move out, he added. Those brats of hers squall all the time.

    Barbette is just two months old, Duane said. She’s a baby, not a brat.

    You’re a brat, Julie said to her twin. You’re the worst brat that ever lived.

    Lick my dick, Jack said, his standard retort to almost anything his sister said.

    Duane tried to imagine what possible discipline might work on the twins. None seemed to stand much chance.

    I’m going to put you out and let you walk home if you keep talking like that, he said. He realized it was an absurd threat, since he had just driven to town in order to prevent the twins from walking anywhere.

    Jack still had several of the quarters Sonny had given him. Shorty dozed on the car seat with his head on Duane’s leg. Jack grabbed Shorty’s tail and began to yank it up and down.

    I’m pretending Shorty’s a slot machine, he said, trying to stick one of the quarters up Shorty’s ass. Shorty woke up and snapped at him but missed. Duane whacked Jack with his work glove. Shorty cringed, thinking the blow had been meant for him. He was too sleepy to know what was going on.

    Don’t treat that dog that way, Duane said.

    Jack snickered. The little pop with the glove hadn’t hurt at all.

    When they got home Karla was wearing a T-shirt that said, I’M NOT DEAF I’M JUST IGNORING YOU. Nellie lay on the couch talking to her boyfriend on the phone.

    Joe Coombs, her boyfriend, was a slow talker insofar as he was a talker at all. Joe worked for a well-service company in Jacksboro. He was short and chunky—the work was so dirty that when he got home in the evening he was often almost indistinguishable from a barrel of oil. Home was a small trailer house on the north edge of Thalia, furnished with a bed and a TV set. Joe Coombs didn’t believe in spending money on frills.

    Joe had a good spirit, though. Just being alive seemed to thrill him, and talking to Nellie on the phone thrilled him so much that he often couldn’t think of anything to say for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Nellie didn’t mind. She was not a big talker herself. Just having Joe on the phone gave her a feeling of peace, even though all they did was hold the phones to their ears for long periods of time.

    Their nonconversation drove Karla almost crazy.

    Talk! she said. One of you talk! He’s not saying anything! You’re not saying anything! Why don’t you get a message machine for a boyfriend? At least a message machine can say a message. That’s more than Joe Coombs can do.

    I don’t care, Momma! Nellie said. I love Joe a whole bunch and he loves me.

    Is Barbette his child by any chance? Karla asked. Barbette, like Little Mike, bore no resemblance to any of Nellie’s husbands.

    Of course not, I never even knew Joe way back then, Nellie said.

    Nellie often thought of moving out so she could talk on the phone to Joe without her mother screaming at her. She could easily get an apartment in Wichita Falls, but whether she could get Minerva to come and help her with the kids was another question. Minerva was reluctant to leave the satellite dish. She liked having two or three hundred movies to choose from every day.

    Unfortunately, Minerva was the only authority Little Mike respected, mainly because she would haul off and whop him with the Cable Guide at the slightest provocation. The Cable Guide was to Minerva what the work glove was to Duane—a handy, nonlethal weapon.

    Although Karla had on the T-shirt that she wore when she wanted to ignore everybody, the sight of her daughter holding a silent phone to her ear for fifteen minutes at a stretch made it difficult for her to practice what her T-shirt preached.

    Say something! she yelled. One of you say something!

    Nellie remained firmly silent. She knew there was no use explaining to her mother how nice it was just to listen to Joe Coombs breathe. There was something very reassuring about the way he breathed when he was on the phone.

    It was quite a bit better than the way he breathed in person, Nellie thought. In person he tended to get too excited. But over the phone his breathing had a wonderful effect. Nellie would be feeling tense and Joe would call and breathe into her ear for a while and help her relax. It was almost like magic how much better she felt sometimes if she could just curl up on her bed and listen to Joe breathe for a few minutes.

    Joe just breathes real sweet, she said, talking about it to her girlfriend Billie Anne.

    CHAPTER 4

    SOMETIMES, DRIVING INTO TOWN—AS HE DID JUST after he met Ruth Popper on the road—Duane found it hard to tell whether he was going forward or backward.

    The pickup was going forward, of course. He was not yet so crazy as to drive into town in reverse. And yet, internally, he ran mostly in reverse. He spent hours replaying old conversations in his head, or reliving past events. If they had been important conversations or crucial events, the habit might have been understandable, but they weren’t. They were just ordinary conversations of the kind he had with Karla or Janine or Sonny Crawford every day. Having such conversations once was enough, yet his brain would sometimes play them back three or four times, as if his brain was a cassette player that kept rewinding and replaying unimportant tapes.

    Driving toward his office, he felt depressed by the knowledge that Ruth wouldn’t be back for at least half an hour. If he went to his office he would have no one to talk to and lots of unpleasant things to think about. He had already thought about most of them while sitting in the hot tub and had no desire to do more thinking that morning.

    Just inside the city limits he passed his own pipeyard with the four towering rigs sitting in it, representing doom. They were all deep rigs and had cost nearly three million dollars apiece. One of them had occasionally been used to drill a well, but the other three had never been out of the pipeyard where they were built. Looking on the bright side—as everyone constantly advised him to do—he could tell himself how lucky he was that there weren’t ten rigs sitting there accumulating rust along with interest he couldn’t pay.

    Lester Marlow, the president of the local bank—and recently indicted on seventy-three counts of bank fraud—had encouraged him to build ten rigs. That had been in the height of the boom, when every headline spoke of the energy crisis. It had been hard to get drills in the ground fast enough to meet the demand for West Texas crude. Duane’s four small rigs operated around the clock, month after month, but they could only drill shallow wells. There was plenty of money to be made from shallow wells, and Duane was making as much of it as anyone in the area, but every banker he brushed elbows with assured him that deep oil was the wave of the future. Lester Marlow breezily offered to loan him thirty million dollars to build deep rigs with.

    After much brooding, Duane decided to build four. Before they were even completed, the wave of the future knocked him right off the surfboard, along with plenty of other surfers. The energy crisis somehow changed into an oil glut. The four new rigs were dead in the water, or, at least, dead in the pipeyard, but the money it had taken to build them was very much alive, hungrily consuming interest payments of more than one hundred thousand dollars a month.

    Lester Marlow’s trial for bank fraud was coming up in three months. He was planning to plead ignorance. Everyone in town agreed that he was ignorant but cheerfully assumed that he was headed for prison.

    Bobby Lee, who hated Lester for having once repossessed a pickup, argued strongly for the death penalty. Never having worn a white collar, he took a tough line on white-collar crime.

    I’d like to see Lester walk the last mile, Bobby Lee said whenever the subject came up.

    Why, he couldn’t walk no mile, Eddie Belt said. Too fat. I doubt he’d make it three hundred feet.

    Eddie, who also worked for Duane, was the local realist.

    It was true that Lester Marlow was substantially overweight. As bank president he had been too busy loaning money to participate in the exercise boom. Shuffling through mounds of loan applications was exercise enough. Never skinny, he soon became fat. Then, as the financial horizons darkened, he became fatter. He could be seen at the Dairy Queen every afternoon, eating banana splits in an effort to forget his problems.

    Duane pulled up in front of his modest office, but didn’t kill the motor or get out. Across the street were the new municipal tennis courts, the latest addition to the Thalia skyline. The west edge of town was so flat and ugly that a tennis net could legitimately count as an addition to the skyline.

    The tennis courts were another product of the brief popularity of exercise. Built during the height of the boom, the courts were in constant use for several months. But tennis proved more complicated than jogging or sitting in hot tubs. Several marriages that were about ready to go anyway collapsed under the unaccustomed stress of mixed doubles. Now the courts were little used. Duane, who played decent tennis, kept a racquet in his office. Sometimes he would go over in the late afternoon and serve a bucket of balls at the tumble weeds piled up against the north fence.

    Rather than go into the empty office, he turned the pickup around and drove to the Dairy Queen. It was ringed with pickups, many of them belonging to his employees. Bobby Lee was there, and also Eddie Belt.

    When Duane got out, Shorty put his front paws on the dashboard and watched him closely. Although Duane went into the Dairy Queen at least twice a day and always came out sooner or later, Shorty was anxious while he was gone. Shorty liked to keep Duane in sight, which was hard to do once he entered the Dairy Queen. By pressing his head against the glass of the windshield, Shorty could catch wavery glimpses of him through the plate-glass windows of the Dairy Queen. It was better than nothing.

    The Dairy Queen was filled with the usual hard-bitten but dejected crowd—nouveau riche only a few months earlier, now nouveau bankrupt.

    I see you brought your land shark, Eddie Belt said, when Duane took his seat at the oilmen’s table. Eddie was referring to Shorty, who could be seen through the big plate-glass window, his head still flattened against the windshield.

    It was a remark Duane heard several times a week. Bobby Lee, whose wit was often indebted to Saturday Night Live, had once referred to Shorty as a land shark, and the phrase had caught on. Shorty was hated throughout the oil patch for his habit of unannounced attacks. He would lie motionless in the pickup seat for hours, looking like a dog that had had a sunstroke, but if some roughneck or old friend of Duane’s so much as leaned an elbow against the pickup, Shorty would strike, instantly and unerringly. He preferred to nip heels, but would make do with elbows, as most of the people who worked for Duane had learned to their sorrow.

    Good morning, Duane said. He had no interest in defending Shorty or in talking about him at all. The thought that most of the people he knew could think of nothing to talk about except the bad habits of his dog often depressed him.

    Junior Nolan was looking particularly low. Junior was fair-skinned, and his forehead had sunburned a fiery red. He wore a cowboy hat when he was in the Dairy Queen but often forgot to put it on when he was outside. It could usually be found on the seat of his pickup.

    Junior had made so much money in the oil business that he had been able to buy a ranch and realize his lifelong dream, which was to be a cowboy. Unfortunately he had to run his ranch almost alone, since most of the cowboys in the area had long since given up and gone to work for oil companies. Junior made do with one ranch hand, an elderly chain-smoker named Mitch Mott, who was sitting beside his boss chain-smoking when Duane sat down.

    Mitch, I thought you quit smoking, Duane said.

    I did, Mitch said, lighting a cigarette off the one he was just finishing. I quit for part of last week. But then I got down in the dumps and the first thing I knew I was smoking again.

    Junior Nolan was well on his way to losing his oil company and his ranch too. He was six foot five, one of the tallest men in the county. Karla had often expressed an interest in him, but so far little seemed to have come of her interest.

    I’ll be damned if I’ll make the first move, she told

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